Before I begin, can I just give my appreciation to Mr. Zuckerberg for making me write about something I just posted about the other day? Here I am trying not to look like a one-issue blogger and now I have to talk Oculus again, this time with a side of reactionary drama and before my other post was scheduled to go live.

Ok, now that’s out of the way. You all heard the news, right? Facebook grossly overpaid Oculus VR to hand over ownership of the hardware startup and announced big plans and high hopes for the future of VR, not only for gaming but in medical, business, and social media applications as well. This isn’t an entirely new move for Facebook, they’ve bought out plenty of smaller companies before and absorbed their resources to increase their reach, but if Zuckerberg’s announcement is to be believed, that isn’t exactly what they’re going for this time.

Which peripheral will offer the better experience? It’s probably not a question worth asking.

Of course, gamers love that kind of competition. It’s in our collective DNA as a subculture to compete between hardware and corporate alliance. All of us remember one console war or another when we were growing up, whether it was Atari and ColecoVision or Sega and Nintendo. There were, and still are, three-or-more-sided battles for gamers’ wallets but often it seems to boil down to two camps of rampant, rabid fans competing to see who can write the most long-winded exposition about why their console of choice I the best, even if the only reason they have it is or was the result of a coin flip performed by their mother before walking into Wal-Mart on black Friday.

Heads, they get the PS4, tails the Xbone, and if it lands on the side I can finally kill them all.

Still, this kind of thing is sort of silly in this case isn’t it? Both devices are currently in beta (with Morpheus still in early alpha for all we know since this is the first we’ve heard of it and Sony is being a tight-lipped jerk) and they’re for two different platforms. They’re also aimed at very different audiences. The only big gaming company to give big support to Oculus is Valve, having released Half-Life 2 support for the headset*, with the rest of its developer backing coming from comparatively tiny indie devs. This set next to Morpheus, rising out of the more-shallow-than-they-were-but-still-pretty-damn-deep pockets of Sony is almost certain to have a few AAA titles in the works once the device gets some momentum. The difference in the headsets’ target markets is further illustrated by their design. Oculus definitely looks like something made by a promising young upstart, whereas Morpheus is definitely being designed to match Sony’s futuristic motif.

Target markets aside, why can’t we at least talk about the specs? Sony’s still using a blurry, ghosting LED screen compared to OLED on the Oculus! The PC headset is CLEARLY superior! Well, sure, we could talk about specs until the damned things are released but that’s the only time it will matter. These are both demo models and while the Oculus is on its second dev kit it’s still nowhere near the final product. Obviously it’s fun to have these little debates, but you’re probably going to end up with whichever one fits your console of choice rather than the other way around.

This is all, of course, a subjective opinion on a largely subjective “war” between peripherals. As I said before it’s still fun to have our little dick-measuring contests (note to self: find a less-gendered way to say that) and poke and jab at fans of the other. Lets just remember how silly it is before people start to get rabid over this whole thing, ok?

With the launch of the Xbox One and Playstation 4, microtransactions in games have come back into the minds of gamers and game journalists, mostly resulting in frustration, anger, and other vitriol all around. Games like Forza 5 for XBone and Gran Turismo 6 on the PS4, neither of them free-to-play, are peppered with microtransactions and pay walls which withhold content from players who have already paid to play the game. Gamers railed against this sort of thing back when Capcom was keeping content which was already on the disc from players who bought Street Fighter X Tekken, so there’s no need to revisit why this is all terrible, greed-ridden filth… But what if someone did it right?

I’ve been playing Warframe for a while, and even relative to the amount of time I’ve spent with other games I’ve loved in the past, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that I’ve been living a good portion of my life during the past few months in the Orokin System, while the rest was dealing with a shitty job and other woes of being a college drop-out piece of trash. Obviously the chance to be a planet-hopping space ninja with superpowers is something to jump on, right? And it’s free? Sign me up!

Of course Digital Extremes, the developer and publisher of Warframe, has to fund the project somehow (oh, how familiar that sounds… shudder), so to get players to fork over some green they’ve got a Market set up, as well as a “Prime Access” program. Let’s pop the hood and see what’s going on in there, shall we?

Sonic made me appreciate indie games in a way which current AAA games couldn’t possibly equal.

Look at Satchbags’s video about the Sonic & Knuckles games. When he references the difference in behavior between Sonic and Super Sonic, specifically the different sprites for “oh shit I’m about to fall over this edge”, it reminds me of the days when I was six or seven years old and playing these games for the first time. I understood, as much as I could at such an age, that there was limited space on these cartridges for the developers to store their game and the files necessary for them to run, so when I found a secret or discovered it online and proved it through gameplay, it was a huge deal because i had found another level of depth that Sega was able to squeeze into this tiny, finite cartridge.

I’ve spent the last week trying desperately to come up with a well-informed and well-researched post for you all to defend my position on file sharing. I’ve talked about it before, saying to anyone who would listen that it doesn’t really hurt the industry and that there’s no way to stop it and x y z you know where this is going. Now, my position hasn’t changed but it is… Let’s just say it’s “in flux” and let the physicists get their TI-84s in a knot about it. My ideals haven’t changed at all, nor have my reasons for supporting “piracy” and calling it by a different, more appropriate name*, but I have been forced to think about it from a different angle recently.

Here’s a story I’ve been meaning to tell you all since, well, this thing got posted. A Closed World, as you might remember, did manage to touch a part of my life which I haven’t really had to wrestle with for a while despite not quite living up to what I and a number of other LGBTQQAI folks feel like a game which is meant to tell straight folks what’s what should have been. It’s nice for what it is, and it might even give some gay or lesbian kids some hope while they’re wrestling with the idea of coming out to their families, but like I said a lot was left out. That’s what we’re going to talk about now.

The simplest way to approach the topic is this: The game’s too simple.

Your character is either male or female. Rigidly. The gender binary is upheld throughout, because telling straight, cis folks that the whole thing is a sham would be too hard for their fragile sensibilities. They’d just fall apart if they heard mention of trans* people, or gender-fluid, gender-neutral, third-gender, gender-queer, and so on down the line, right? Right.

By now we’ve all heard the rumors about the next-gen Xbox blocking used games. Chances are, you’re reacting in one of three ways: either you don’t care because you can afford to buy new games anyway, you see what Microsoft is doing and figure they’re just doing what’s best for business, or you’re pissed off because what they’re doing is making a direct impact on what you can do with the property you bought under completely legal circumstances.

Wanna guess where I stand?

The idea is sound from a business stand point: developers and publishers get nothing from retailers for games bought used and, sure, maybe they deserve a cut of those profits. Blocking used games from being played in a console other than one belonging to whoever bought it would certainly remove the incentive to go out and buy a used game a few weeks after launch and maybe persuade folks to save up and just buy new. If you’re nodding your head right now, I respect your opinion but I question whether or not you’ve taken the time to think this through.

I recently came across a video on YouTube which suggested that Homestuck might be the Ulysses of the Internet. For those who don’t know, Ulysses is a famously incomprehensible novel by James Joice, so analogizing it to Homestuck works just fine for me. The idea stuck with me, and after a long while of thinking and watching JonTron videos for hours on end, I had it: Conker’s Bad Fur Day is the A Midsummer Night’s Dream of gaming!

Remember this game? I do. The impression it made with its marketing was weird, shocking, and powerful. I remember wanting to run out and buy it on launch day, but for reasons I’ll explain further down the page.

Whether we’re looking at Mortal Komat‘s Mileena or Vagina Dentata, it’s no small secret that men almost universally fear female sexuality whether it is controlled by patriarchy or left unrestrained. I’m not smart enough to unpack the reasons why, but I can predict with reasonable confidence that a perusal of folklore will turn up more feminine monsters of sexuality then masculine. I’ve never seen any “Penis Dentata” anywhere… yet.

Don’t draw it!

By itself, that’s just sort of interesting. Looking only at the fear and setting aside the inexcusable horrors committed in its name by hairless apes with ideologies can tell us more about how to stop rapes, child mutilations, and Drano abortions, but that’s not what Catherine does.